by Jeff Nesbit
“You sure?” I asked. “It’s breathtaking out here. The mountains just seem to claw their way toward the sky. You can see in all directions for miles and miles.”
“I’m sure,” she answered. “So what are you doing in Bozeman?”
“I’m about to find out.” I told her a bit of my conversation with Frank and that I was heading to someplace called the Fortress. I asked her about Jude’s Senate race, which was only a few weeks away now.
“He’s going to win easily,” she reasoned. “The Times just ran a story on some of the latest polls. It doesn’t look like it’ll even be close.”
“I guess his luck keeps holding.”
“Doesn’t look like luck to me,” Sandy replied. “The ads he’s been running are brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Every ad agency in the city is wondering where the concepts came from.”
“What are they?” I asked. For reasons I obviously couldn’t explain to Sandy, I’d never asked Jude what he would tell the public about his reasons for running for the Senate. I knew why he was running, just as I’d known why he’d taken every other path in his life.
“It’s a story,” she explained. “He’s been telling the story of his life, in chapters, for the last four weeks. No ad is the same. Every spot tells a completely new and different part of his life. People are going online to find the ads that they missed, like they’re episodes of a television series. He uses celebrities and famous events and icons in each of them. But not in a pretentious or obnoxious way. They’re simply part of the fabric of who he is. They relate to what he says is the best of America, what he wants Americans to celebrate about their way of life. Thomas, I have to say—honestly—they’re inspiring. I’m inspired by them—by him. They make you want to go out and knock on doors for him, propel him into office. I don’t know any other way to say it. He just looks like a leader—one whom we always seemed to be waiting for but who never actually showed up on the scene.”
“You do know that this is my twin brother you’re talking about here, right?” I chided her. “So I guess you’re going to vote for him?”
She laughed. I liked the sound of it and wished I were there beside her to hear it. “Yeah, I guess I’ll vote for him—even if he is ugly.”
“Hey! Be nice.”
“You know,” she said, lowering her voice, “you’ve always been so circumspect about your brother. I know that something happened between you two years ago and that you don’t really talk much anymore. I guess that’s why I’ve been so interested in these ads that sort of tell the story of Jude. It’s been fun to follow along. And I think other people feel that way too. It’s like he’s giving people a chance to peek inside his life a bit.”
“Well, good for him,” I said, trying to keep the edge out of my voice. “I’m glad Jude has found a way to tell his life story. But I can assure you—it’s the story he wants you to hear, the way he wants you to hear it.” I stopped. I really didn’t want Sandy to hear the bitterness I harbored.
“What is it?” she asked. “What is it about your brother that troubles you so much that you can’t even speak about it to me or anyone else?”
I almost told her, right then. But I knew how silly it would sound, how thoroughly and utterly insane it would seem to her. People do things for all kinds of personal, self-centered reasons. Everyone is the center of their own universe, the star of their own, personal drama. My brother had just taken that up a few levels—quite a few levels.
“Oh, it’s nothing, Sandy. Really. I just know Jude well, better than anyone. And he’s not perfect, no matter how it comes off to other people. That’s all.”
“None of us are perfect,” she said quietly. “We all make mistakes. I’m sure your brother is no different.”
“Oh, he’s different,” I replied. “And he knows what he’s doing. But maybe we can just leave it at that. Is that all right, for now?”
“For now. But someday you’ll tell me, right? You’ll tell me what happened and why you and your brother don’t talk anymore?”
I paused. “Yeah, someday. But not now, not over the phone.”
“I mean it,” she said, her tone softer. “I want to know a lot more about you, in all ways. I like where we’re going. And part of that is knowing the hard parts of your life—not just the easy ones. I want you to feel safe with me.”
I closed my eyes, imagining what Sandy looked like at that moment at the other end of the line. “I will,” I vowed. “I promise. But, first, I need to get to the bottom of this journey I find myself on.”
“Come home soon, okay?”
“I will. Soon.”
As I drove toward Kalispell, I found myself wondering why, exactly, Frank Gore had decided to trust me with this journey into the heart of his own carefully managed world. Frank was no intellectual slouch. I’d grown to admire his dry wit during some of our late-night conversations as I recovered from the day’s troubles in a motel room.
Frank seemed to genuinely enjoy my questions. He never took offense to anything I asked, no matter how abrupt it might have seemed. People told reporters all types of things that they shouldn’t tell a soul. But it wasn’t that way with Frank. He knew precisely what he was doing by opening up to me.
I concluded, on my drive to the Fortress, that Frank probably wanted to see if someone who was not from his conspiracy-minded world could take a hard, objective look at his life’s mission and not reject it out of hand. I was that witness, and Frank wanted to see if he could convince me, both through words and a peek inside the machinery.
I spied the Fortress from miles off. It wasn’t hidden—not by any means. In fact, anyone driving north and west toward the mountains could clearly see it halfway up the gently rising eastern slope of what ultimately becomes one of the tallest mountains in this part of the country. The turrets and towers atop a very large retaining wall had seemingly been carved right out of the side of the mountain. They were impossible to miss as a car approached the foothills leading upward.
There was no way at all to take the Fortress by surprise—not unless you planned on storming the place with a series of military-style helicopters capable of literally dropping out of the sky from the west and over the top of the mountain ridge that towered over the top.
No, to get to the Fortress, you had to drive along a road that wound back and forth for nearly an hour. Anyone watching from the highest points along the wall around the Fortress could see approaching cars the entire time. It was literally impossible to sneak up on the Fortress.
As I made my way back and forth along the switchbacks, I wondered how many eyes were watching my progress at that moment, weapons at their sides. I assumed there were at least a few watching me make my way to this place, given that Frank had told them that I was on my way. No matter. I’d deal with whatever I found when I arrived. I wasn’t worried.
When I made the final turn on the last switchback, road signs told me to slow to fifteen miles an hour. I slowed the car and came to a halt several minutes later in front of one of the more elaborate gates I’d seen.
The architects had taken the notion of a gated community and pumped it full of steroids. The gate had triple hinges on both sides and large metal poles that slid up and down at the center of the gate into drilled holes in the cement beneath the gate. There was a call box off to the driver’s side of what had become a narrow, one-way street entering the compound.
I laughed out loud when I read the words etched into the plate at the top of the gate: Lord Acton Gate. That was clearly someone’s idea of an inside joke. Lord Acton, a Christian and libertarian in some ways, was most famous for defining the power of the state. “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely,” Acton had written.
I punched the button on the call box and waited. “Welcome, Mr. Asher,” said a calm, soothing voice from a speaker on the side of the box. “We’ve been expecting
you. The gate will open in just a moment, and you’ll be able to drive inside. Someone will be there to greet you.”
I didn’t wonder how they’d known it was me. But I did wonder what might be waiting for me on the other side. So I decided to ask. “If I might, could you tell me who exactly will be there to greet me when I arrive?”
“Why, the director, of course,” said the voice. “We’ve been expecting you for some time—for days, in fact, as word traveled about your inquiries and questions. All roads like the one you are traveling tend to arrive here eventually.”
The gate swung open then. I drove in.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Jude made his big move shortly before our thirtieth birthdays. It had always been a running joke between the two of us. “No one takes you seriously before you turn thirty, so you might as well try everything you can until then.”
That wasn’t true, of course. But it made for a good story at dinner parties and afforded Jude some public leeway to experiment a bit in the marketplace and financial world.
By our thirtieth birthdays, Asher Enterprises had become one of the five wealthiest private companies in America. Every so often, I asked Jude whether there was ever any need to take the company public, especially as we grew more successful.
“Why?” he’d answer. “So that we have to file quarterly reports with the SEC, hold inane quarterly earnings reports for the financial media who ask stupid questions, take a short-term view of how to grow wealth, and generally make ourselves insane each quarter to show consistent growth?”
With Singen’s steady hand at the wheel, Jude and Asher Enterprises became quite adept at buying entire companies and turning them into industry leaders in a very short period of time. Because it was a private company that owned other big companies, Asher Enterprises was free to maneuver easily between widely different industries with seemingly different markets and objectives. There were no shareholders looking over our shoulders, second-guessing our intentions, motives, or strategies.
Yet in those acquisitions, Jude somehow managed to find the most unusual joint ventures that benefitted the different companies in Asher Enterprises’ portfolio of companies. It was almost as if he had inside knowledge about where to look for value, how to buy a potential industry leader right before that industry exploded, or how to reach across industries to create wealth through nothing more than synergy.
For instance, Asher Enterprises once bought a railroad line teetering on the edge of bankruptcy because it was easier and cheaper to ship goods by truck or barge. Railroads seemed an archaic thing of the past. This particular rail line ran from Canada, through the Dakotas and the American West, and then down to a dilapidated waterfront in Houston, Texas. There seemed no good reason to buy the railroad line, because there was no compelling need to ship on the rail lines.
At the same time, Asher Enterprises purchased nearly three million separate leases on big parcels of land all throughout the Dakotas and much of Canada. Because we were private, we didn’t have to announce it publicly. We just bought the leases and held them.
Jude then met with the economic minister of Israel and created a joint venture to bring a newly developed technology to commercial scale—a technology that allowed a drilling development company to bring oil trapped in shale rock to the surface without using water and fracturing technology.
And when the State Department in the United States denied a controversial pipeline that was supposed to carry oil from parts of Canada to American ports, Asher Enterprises stepped in and offered cheap rail service. It also immediately turned the dilapidated Houston waterfront property into a line of refineries almost overnight.
In one fell swoop, Jude had created a new cradle-to-grave industry that used leading-edge technology to bring what was called “tight oil” economically and efficiently from both the Dakotas and Canada, ship it directly by a rail line that Asher Enterprises owned and had seemingly built to directly serve this new venture, refine the oil in new plants at the port in Houston, and then sell it directly to China to fuel their energy-hungry economy in a deal that Jude and Singen negotiated directly with the Chinese president.
Because Asher Enterprises wasn’t required to report any of this activity to the SEC, shareholders, or the financial press, much of it had gone unnoticed. But the financial press was clearly starting to take notice and had begun to write stories about how and why Asher Enterprises always seemed to guess correctly at critical moments. Jude’s ability to know things seemed prescient to them. If they only knew.
The financial press also tried to guess at our net worth. They always got it completely wrong, underestimating our true net worth by a considerable margin. What none of the reporters could possibly see were all of the other activities where Singen was mentoring Jude. There were the infrequent, big bets against various currencies that always seemed timed just right. But there were other things that seemingly made no sense to anyone, yet they created vast wealth because they were so thoroughly tied to the underlying economy of an individual country. Jude was, in fact, learning how to control the wealth of nations.
“Did you know that you can actually sell water?” Jude told me once. “It’s more valuable than oil in some countries.”
“How is that possible?” I’d asked him. The notion seemed a bit crazy. Water was free and abundant—or so I thought.
“A billion people in Southeast Asia depend on the monsoon season for their fresh water. When something happens to it, then things get disrupted. There are parts of China that struggle for water when the glaciers in the Himalayas change. Parts of Africa are in their fourth year of sustained droughts, so water has to be provided from other parts of the world to sustain their domestic agriculture. Water can be a commodity just like anything else.”
Jude also explained how China had cornered the market on the ability to refine rare metals that were critical for everything from cell phones to advanced weapons systems. So Jude cut a deal with the Chinese president—his new best friend—and broke that monopoly. The White House and Pentagon, and every technology company in the world, were now in his debt.
“But the thing that really astounds me—and which I wouldn’t even have guessed if Singen had not shown me how it was possible—is that we are literally able to pick up the debt of an entire country,” Jude told me one evening as we stood admiring the view of Central Park from his office.
“An entire country? Like assuming the mortgage debt on a house?” I’d asked.
“Not a large country, mind you,” Jude had said. “But, yes, it’s not unlike taking over the mortgage payments on a house. The country starts writing checks to Asher Enterprises, with most of it being interest payments.”
“So it really is a bit like a mortgage payment?”
“Yes, a bit like that, only at a slightly bigger level.” He’d laughed.
“And if the country decides it doesn’t want to pay the interest on that debt any longer?”
“Doesn’t happen. We can always renegotiate or restructure. The payments keep coming at some level. No country wants to default on its debt. It prints money before coming to that. Either way, we’re fine.”
“And you always have Singen and the regents at your side,” I’d said calmly.
“Yes,” he’d said, smiling. “There is that as well. But, honestly, it amazes me that a private company, even one with the capital resources we now command, can actually cover the debt of an entire country. It’s quite extraordinary.”
Every so often, a reporter would ask me why I wasn’t just running companies like my much more famous twin brother. I always replied with the same answer. “Not my thing. I like reporting and writing. It’s what I want to do.” Every reporter who ever asked me this question believed I was stark-raving mad. Who worked for a living as a scribe when they could own the barrels of ink? It made no sense to them.
In my heart, I knew that I’
d have to give up the charade at some point and quit writing about things from the sidelines. But I wanted to hold on to my own world for as long as humanly possible. It wasn’t something I could explain to anyone. I didn’t want my brother’s world. I wanted my own life. And, for now, that meant observing and writing about the natural world that my brother had no part in. I couldn’t see an alternate path.
But all of this paled in comparison when Jude made his big bet right before our thirtieth birthday. I guess I should have seen it coming, if I’d thought about it at all. Whatever slim hope I’d harbored about maintaining a low profile in the world vanished in the face of the scrutiny that followed in the wake of Jude’s bet.
Just as Asher Enterprises had taken over debt payments in several small countries, China had assumed a significant portion of the debt for the United States. I had no earthly idea how this was possible, but Singen clearly understood it. So, by extension, Jude did as well.
China had been trying for years to establish its own currency, the yuan, on world markets. That was one of the reasons China’s leaders were more than happy to buy up so much of America’s debt—it lent enormous credibility to the yuan. China even managed to pull a handful of countries away from the US financial orbit. But the dollar was still, in effect, the world’s currency. Nothing China’s leadership did seemed to change the equation between the yuan and the dollar.
Until Jude’s bet. What I knew—because I’d sat in the boardroom with Jude and Singen for the pivotal meeting during which they made their decision—was that it was a willful, deliberate effort on Jude’s part to push things to the point where such a bet was even possible. And I knew the effort Jude had gone through to make $2 billion by shorting Japan’s currency had been only a trial run for this much larger bet.
It began with a series of joint deals with the Chinese president that linked the yuan to a series of debt instruments that Asher Enterprises now essentially controlled in countries on four continents. China then began to exert its influence in those areas, triggering further actions.